Knitting friends, I’m just about down for the count at the moment. Grading is sucking the life out of me, daylight is almost non-existent, I’ve barely started Christmas shopping let alone any gift knitting, I can’t go out running until the spiky anti-ice implements I purchased for my shoes arrive in the mail, I’m getting pre-holiday holiday blues, and I’ve been pleased enough to devote any time to knitting at all let alone take pictures of it.

Thus far, I’ve been fortunate enough to never have a cat that climbed the Christmas tree, but it has always been policy at our place that only non-breakable things get hung at the bottom foot or so of the tree. And we’ve pretty much always found at least a few of them in amongst the presents eventually, so it’s probably been for the best.

I had a cat, Bubba, that would eat the tree. So we got a fake silver and white tree, figuring he would see it was fake and leave it be, but no, the next morning there were little sparkly piles of cat barf all over the livingroom floor as if to say, “You shall not foil MY Christmas tradition, no matter what!!”

Another cat, Jack, would empty the bottom two feet of the tree of all decorations during the night. I could have sworn he had a prideful look on his face as he followed me around each morning as I hunted the house for the ornaments and returned them to the tree.

Then there was Blackie. He never touched the tree but you couldn’t leave a present anywhere without it being torn open. This came in handy if you wanted to open a present early and see what it was, you just blamed it on the cat.

I miss those cats. So far our tree this year is quite intact and our current cats, Skidz and Elsie, could not care less about it. Much easier to manage but not quite so much fun to recount their lack of interest. Good Yule and Happy Holidays to all!

Marvelous! Growing up, we always had ornaments that were specifically for the bottom of the tree – for the cats. Now, my two are pretty good – except I do have one climber. But she’s bigger now, so I don’t know if she’ll climb, or if bad things will happen. They’ve been restrained so far. We still decorate the tree with the bottom third reserved for “unbreakable” ornaments.

My two cats are doing almost the same!!!!
I don’t know if they do love my christmas tree, but they stay under it all the time, trying to eat the lights, aaarrrggggg!!!!
I loved your blog, Glenna!!!
Hugs from Belgium :)

My family is a dog family but the current one does his share of trying to destroy ornaments. His second x-mas he got excited barking from the arm of the couch and jumped off the edge only to land in the tree instead. He never ran so fast as when that tree crashed down. But, he did spend hours hiding under my bed so I think he was sorry about doing so much damage that time. There was never a chance of keeping this dog off the furniture as he was almost catlike in his ability to climb as a puppy. From that disastrous day on, we’ve been careful to put the empty ornament boxes around the tree to barricade him from getting too close. He still manages to kill an ornament or two every Christmas.